


Never Have I Ever

by kittydesade



Category: Once Upon a Time (2011)
Genre: Gen, Misses Clause Challenge, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-24
Updated: 2011-12-24
Packaged: 2017-10-28 01:33:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,027
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/302260
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kittydesade/pseuds/kittydesade
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A baby shower slumber party game turns into a little more than the girls expected.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Never Have I Ever

**Author's Note:**

  * For [DelwynCole](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DelwynCole/gifts).



"Hey Ashley. Your turn."

Never Have I Ever. They played it in school, they played it after school, now they played it for Janet's baby shower. Among the several other silly games the various girls had proposed, but when Eleanor brought up truth or dare no one was willing to try and match her for creativity on the fly, so they went to gossip and sordid pasts. Most of them had a pretty skewed value of sordid, but Ruby and Ashley and Janet made up an interesting enough circle. They all poured themselves drinks and kept their own count without holding up fingers, and slowly the statements got more and more outrageous.

Ashley looked around. She had to be the second most drunk of the girls, but Ruby somehow managed to hold her liquor, to the point where only Ashley's head lolled a bit on her neck, eyes drooping. "Never have I ever..." her lower lip curled up under her teeth for a second. "Slept with..." Immediately Dawn and Marie looked relieved. "Mr. Gold."

Ruby stretched her long legs out along the side of the bed, ignoring the looks from the other girls, and tossed back her sixth shot. Everyone stared. Janet choked on her giggles. Not what she'd expected from Ruby, but also it didn't surprise her, somehow. The lack of surprise surprised her. And okay, yes, the choice of men, because although there weren't that many eligible men in Storybrooke, she couldn't imagine putting 'Gold' and 'sexy' in the same sentence.

Neither could anyone else, it looked like. "Oh my god you didn't." Ashley flat-out gaped. "Seriously?"

"That's just... ew!" Marie made several faces going from disgust to incredulity and back to sticking her tongue out and wiping her palms down on her nightgown. "Oh, ew."

Janet finally edged in her only objection, which was: "Really? The man has no ass." A couple of the girls stared at her for objecting on the grounds of lack of sex appeal.

Ruby laughed, shrugged, one foot twirling a lazy circle in the air. "Yeah, but... You know, for a scrawny old guy, he's really..."

Dawn clapped her hands over her ears and squeaked. Janet snickered at both of them. "I don't want to know that! I really don't need to know that."

The other girl grinned over at her. "Want me to hook you up? Only I think he likes the new chick, Emma, better."

Janet fell back onto the bed, howling with laughter amidst the scandalized noises of most of the other girls. "Seriously? Really?" She hadn't even known Emma had met the pawnbroker, although it didn't surprise her. Gold knew everyone. Janet waited for the noise to die down then went ahead and asked the burning question, even though she'd just told Ruby to stop sharing. "So, was he good?"

"Oh, you have no idea." Which set Janet off again, which made Ruby crack, which brought another chorus of disgust and disbelief from everyone else. Ashley, in particular, looked like she wanted to take a steel-wool shower. All kinds of ideas flew through Janet's mind at that point, from the thought that maybe Sean wasn't the real father of Ashley's baby to what Gold had to do with her pregnancy and the incident on the edge of town and Sean dropping out of contact with her, to, well, a lot of things. She kept those ideas to herself, though. Or she could talk them out with Ruby later on.

Marie made faces the longest. "Okay, Ruby? Seriously, have you slept with everyone in Storybrooke?"

"Every guy, anyway," Eleanor grinned, arching her eyebrows with the suggestion that she might like to join Ruby as a competitor in the bedroom olympics At least, she looked like she didn't care one way or the other for what that kind of thing did to a girl's reputation.

Ruby didn't much care, either, not for herself. She reached into the snack bowl and grabbed a gumball, popped it out of its wrapper. "Not everyone. Just the interesting ones."

"Dr. Hopper?" Bella guessed. Janet knew the answer to that before Ruby said anything.

"Nah. He's too shy, he's the kind of guy who wants to wait for someone really special." A chorus of 'awww's punctuated that. "I mean, I asked, but..."

Mary Margaret choked on her apple cider; Janet wondered if that had been on purpose or a hilarious coincidence. "You propositioned Dr. Hopper?"

"Sure, why not? No harm in asking, anyway. Besides, he's cute." Nods all around. Ruby grinned. "You should try asking him out sometime, instead of Dr. Ego."

Janet's hand clapped over her mouth to keep from dribbling out apple cider from laughing. There were a couple nods of agreement, a head-shake from Ashley, and a questioning look from Bella. "I don't know, I always thought Dr. Whale was kind of cute..." Did everyone know he'd asked Mary Margaret out? No, never mind. Small town gossip.

Ruby curled her feet under her and sat up a bit as though giving a lecture, which Janet suspected she was about to do. "Oh, sure, he's cute, he's really kind of handsome. But he's really shallow. I mean, we..."

Somehow Janet's stifled frantic gestures behind Mary Margaret's head caught her friend's attention. The poor woman didn't need to hear the graphic details, especially not after the whole encounter had, as far as Janet knew, happened right around the time of Mary Margaret's first date with the guy.

"... you want someone who's interested in you. Not someone who wants to sleep with you because you're hot and he's horny."

Mary Margaret blushed, looked down. Ashley reached over and touched her shoulder. "It's true, though," she told her. "I mean, not that sex is going to be all fun all the time even when it's with the right guy, but..."

"You want it to be about more than just the sex," Janet supplied.

Mary Margaret's fingers twisted in her skirts. Bella came to her rescue, sort of. "Yeah, but you and Tom were going to get married anyway, weren't you? When his term was up? I mean, you were with him for, what..."

"Since high school," Janet smiled, a little crooked and wobbly, but she couldn't help smiling. "Or, well, since I was in high school and he came home after Basic. You should have heard Dad screech when he found out..."

Ashley winced. They shared the distinction of being the two women in Storybrooke in recent memory who had gotten pregnant before they'd gotten either married or settled into a long term relationship. Pregnant teenagers, no less. "Hey, at least he didn't try to convince you to give up your baby to avoid a scandal."

"Oh, he knows better than that," Janet grated out through a clenched jaw and a forced smile. "I'll have my baby on my own terms, I don't need his damn permission to do it." She got high fives from Ruby and, of all people, Mary Margaret for that one. Eleanor, too far away to high-five, saluted her with her glass.

"Hey, how come..." Dawn started, then blushed halfway through, which of course incited everyone else's curiosity. "Um. I mean. How come Ruby's never... you know."

Ruby, Ashley, and Janet exchanged a three way look. "Gotten knocked up," Ruby tilted her head. Dawn blushed harder.

"Well. Yeah. I mean, you sleep with, like, everybody..." Snickering. Into her palm in Janet's case, with a half-shocked gasp from Marie who Janet was increasingly feeling should not have been invited. Too young for this kind of conversation. Maybe. "Doesn't that... I mean, shouldn't you..."

"What?" Ruby cracked her gum, grinned. "I like sex."

"Besides, I probably have more sex than she does." Janet thought about that. "No, Ashley probably does. Then me, then," she nodded at Ruby, who nodded back and took it up again.

"Hey, just because I have a lot of different partners doesn't mean I go around sleeping with a different guy every night."

"Besides, this?" Janet gestured down at her somewhat obvious belly with her glass. "This is living proof that the phrase '99% effective' isn't just on the boxes for show. The more sex you have, the more your odds..."

"Not," Mary Margaret coughed. "Necessarily true. I mean, not that way. But I take your point..." and the rest of it was lost in her mumbling into her glass.

None of the girls seemed to know what to say to that. Ashley stared at her toes for a while, leading Janet to guess that the same thing had happened to her. Too much sex, not enough protection or not enough luck or both. Now she wanted this to be somewhere other than her baby shower, so she could sit down with Ashley and talk to her about it. Funny how Ashley was the one who'd gone this route before her, and yet she felt like more of an adult, or more ready for it or something. Maybe that would change tomorrow. Janet was still waiting for the panic to set in.

And the conversation continued on without her. Mary Margaret turned to face Ruby, as Bella brushed out the younger woman's hair. "But, see, that's what I don't get. All these men... Don't you... I mean, isn't it... without love, isn't..." Her fingers fluttered over her skirt.

Ruby shrugged. "Not really. I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm not ruling it out, but I'm not going to sit around and wait for the right guy."

"But isn't it kind of... empty?"

"Who says? Love isn't the only way you can connect with people, you know, I mean, there's having fun, there's talking about stuff. I mean, with G--" half the girls started shrieking before she'd completed even that one syllable. "With He Who Shall Not Be Named, we had a lot of fun just hanging around and talking, before and after. I mean, as long as you know you're not in it because you think you're in love with the guy, and you don't let him think you are, you both know what you're doing and why you're doing it... it's all good."

Janet lifted her glass into the blinking, bemused silence and clinked her sparkling apple juice against Ruby's shot. "And that is why you are my best friend," she told her, and they slammed back their drinks.

"Damn straight."

She licked the tingling traces of apple juice off her lips. "I still wouldn't sleep with Gold."

Ruby laughed. "Yes. I slept with the sleazy pawnbroker and it was fan-fucking-tastic." The last part she had to shout over the screeches and screams of the other girls, in which Janet joined in with gusto because the man was truly terrifyingly sketchy.

"Yeah, and what if you'd gotten pregnant then?" Marie retorted. Even more screaming. Complete with Janet's horrified laughter and Ruby yelping ew! no! and making warding off gestures with her hands. Ashley yelled the loudest.

"That man would be a horrible father. Ever."

Again, no one asked how she figured that one out. "The odds of you getting pregnant sleeping with a guy one time are pretty damn small anyway, and Ruby uses protection, don't you?"

"Uh-huh," Ruby shrugged. "Besides, the only way to really be sure you'll never get pregnant? Is to just not have sex, and no way in hell I'm doing that." Then she stopped, considered. "Or just have sex only with women."

Dawn made a face at that, as a couple of the other ladies blinked. "Bleh. Never will I ever sleep with another woman."

"You don't know what you're missing," Ruby murmured, sing-song, smirking.

"Never have I ever, never will I ever." A couple of nods all around at the first one. Janet and Ruby exchanged a look. Ruby was reaching for her glass, too, when Janet said it.

"Never have I ever had a threesome, either." Her eyes opened wide and innocent as she tossed back the last of her apple cider. Ruby tossed back two shots, one after the other, then flipped the glasses and added them to her stack.

Dead silence in the room. Everyone stared.

"What?"


End file.
